Staging live events: converging experience design and live art (original) (raw)

Experience Design Theatre: Exploring the Role of Live Theatre in Scaffolding Design Dialogues

Proceedings of ACM CHI 2014, 2014

While theatre has been used in HCI as a tool for engaging participants in design processes, the specific benefits of using live theatre over other communicative mediums, remains underexplored. In this paper we introduce Experience Design Theatre (EDT) as an approach to undertaking experience-centered design with multiple parties in the early stages of design. EDT was motivated by a need to involve several diverse groups of people in the design of a digitally coordinated care service -NetCarers. We used live theatre as a way to engage small groups of participants in dialogues around the design of NetCarers, to qualify their contributions in a refined performance, and to communicate their concerns and aspirations to domain experts. We highlight key benefits to using live theatre in experience-centered design and offer insights for researchers undertaking similar work in the future.

Performing perception—staging aesthetics of interaction

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2008

In interaction design for experience-oriented uses of technology, a central facet of aesthetics of interaction is rooted in the user's experience of herself “performing her perception.” By drawing on performance (theater) theory, phenomenology and sociology and with references to recent HCI-work on the relation between the system and the performer/user and the spectator's relation to this dynamic, we show how the user is simultaneously operator, performer and spectator when interacting. By engaging with the system, she continuously acts out these three roles and her awareness of them is crucial in her experience. We argue that this 3-in-1 is always already shaping the user's understanding and perception of her interaction as it is staged through her experience of the object's form and expression. Through examples ranging from everyday technologies utilizing performances of interaction to spatial contemporary artworks, digital as well as analogue, we address the notio...

"Digital Art Live: Exploring the Aesthetics of Interactivity"

While technologies and theories of interactive media have developed exponentially over the past twenty five years, an aesthetics of interactivity, as a philosophy of perception and validation of interactivity as a form of art, has been slower to emerge. While aesthetic inquiry has expanded to investigate the sensuous perception of many forms of electronic art, interactivity as an expressive medium, challenges many fundamental assumptions of traditional aesthetics This paper addresses the performative aesthetics of interactivity through a consideration of a programme of interactive art works presented through the Digital Art Live (DAL) project in Auckland. The DAL initiative is New Zealand’s only specialised, ongoing, interactive art programme. It has engaged both public and private entities, artists, developers, community organizations, staff and students from three universities. The location of the DAL screen in a performing arts complex introduces some new perspectives into the emerging discourse about interaction, aesthetics and creative practices. Nine DAL projects are considered in relation to issues raised in Simon Penny’s critical interrogation of the performative aesthetics of interactivity (2010) and literature on contemporary aesthetics. Key issues including the importance of aesthetic inquiry; the notion of performativity as meaningful, embodied practice; object/veiwer spatial relationships; synesthetics and the interdisciplinarity of interactve art; and the relationship between representation and interaction are adressed as part of ongoing research into interactive art that is being conducted through the DAL project.

Crafting participation: designing ecologies, configuring experience

Visual Communication, 2002

There is a growing interest amongst both artists and curators in designing art works which create new forms of visual communication and enhance interaction in museums and galleries. Despite extraordinary advances in the analysis of talk and discourse, there is relatively little research concerned with conduct and collaboration with and around aesthetic objects and artefacts, and to some extent, the social and cognitive sciences have paid less attention to the ways in which conduct -both visual and vocal -is inextricably embedded within the immediate ecology, the material realities at hand. In this article, we examine how people in and through interaction with others, explore, examine and experience a mixed-media installation. Whilst primarily concerned with interaction with and around an art work, the article is concerned with the ways in which people, in interaction with each other (both those they are with and others who happen to be in the same space), reflexively constitute the sense and significance of objects and artefacts, and the ways in which those material features reflexively inform the production and intelligibility of conduct and interaction.

Interaction Design for Live Performance

The role of interactive technology in live performance has increased substantially in recent years. Practices and experiences of existing forms of live performance have been transformed and new genres of technology-mediated live performance have emerged in response to novel technological opportunities. Consequently, designing for live performance is set to become an increasingly important concern for interaction design researchers and practitioners. However, designing interactive technology for live performance is a challenging activity, as the experiences of both performers and their audiences are shaped and influenced by a number of delicate and interconnected issues, which relate to different forms and individual practices of live performance in varied and often conflicting ways. The research presented in this thesis explores how interaction designers might be better supported in engaging with this intricate and multifaceted design space. This is achieved using a practice-led methodology, which involves the researcher’s participation in both the investigation of, and design response to, issues of live performance as they are embodied in the lived and felt experiences of individual live performers’ practices during three interaction design case studies. This research contributes to the field of interaction design for live performance in three core areas. Understandings of the relationships between key issues of live performance and individual performers’ lived and felt experiences are developed, approaches to support interaction designers in engaging individual live performers’ lived and felt experiences in design are proposed and innovative interfaces and interaction techniques for live performance are designed. It is anticipated that these research outcomes will prove directly applicable or inspiring to the practices of interaction designers wishing to address live performance and will contribute to the ongoing academic discourse around the experience of, and design for, live performance.

Design in Action: Unpacking the Artists’ Role in Performance-Led Research

Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2021

This paper illustrates design work carried out to develop an interactive theater performance. HCI has started to address the challenges of designing interactive performances, as both audience and performers' experiences are considered, and a variety of professional expertise become involved. Nevertheless, research has overlooked how such design unfolds in practice, and what role artists play in exploring the both the creative opportunities and the challenges associated with digital technologies. A two-day workshop was conducted to tailor the use of an interactive mask within a performance. The analysis highlights the artists' work to make the mask work while framing, exploring and conceptualizing its use. The discussion outlines the artists' skills and design expertise, and how acknowledging them reconfigure the role of HCI in performanceled research.

Designing the spectator experience

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2005

Interaction is increasingly a public affair, taking place in our theatres, galleries, museums, exhibitions and on the city streets. This raises a new design challenge for HCIhow should spectators experience a performer's interaction with a computer? We classify public interfaces (including examples from art, performance and exhibition design) according to the extent to which a performer's manipulations of an interface and their resulting effects are hidden, partially revealed, fully revealed or even amplified for spectators. Our taxonomy uncovers four broad design strategies: 'secretive,' where manipulations and effects are largely hidden; 'expressive,' where they tend to be revealed enabling the spectator to fully appreciate the performer's interaction; 'magical,' where effects are revealed but the manipulations that caused them are hidden; and finally 'suspenseful,' where manipulations are apparent but effects are only revealed as the spectator takes their turn.

Staging tourism: Performing place

Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts

This project examines the relationship between architecture and the tourist experience. In architecture, an understanding of the active tourist body is underdeveloped as visuality is often positioned as the dominant mode of analysing tourism. This project mobilizes the tourist by recognising a paradigmatic shift from the”‘gaze” towards “performance”, which privileges the multisensuous experiences of the tourist engaged with architecture. The project investigates how architecture can stage and amplify the performances of tourists in order to produce place, en route. To test this enquiry, a “design through research” methodology is employed where the design proposition is developed through iterative design experiments. The design proposition is explored across three increasing scales, progressing the research through stages of development and refinement. The first experiment engages with the human scale through a 1:1 installation. The next experiment amplifies the practices of performi...